FKO 2020: Cultivating Care
HATLO with participation by Alyza DelPan-Monley, Shelby Handler, Nic Masangkay, Shireen and Mehera, Minna Lee, and Will Darling as a special contributing artist
Cultivating Care: #Scorentine Edition
September 28 – October 2, 2020
INTRODUCTION BY HATLO
Welcome to the developing Cultivating Care practice: a collective reflection and exploration of our relationship to care. Cultivating Care includes a special edition of Scorentine and is part of Velocity’s Fall Kick Off.
Each day Monday Sept 28 through Friday Oct 2nd, we will focus on a different Refractory Aspect of Care with a new set of prompts + context links posted on Velocity’s Instagram. You can engage and respond to these however you’d like, through social media or not. This practice is an experiment and a foray, an attempt at collective investigation, an understanding that the water is deep and then a wading in as far as you’re moved to. Below is an early glimpse of the process of developing the materials that will be shared during the kick-off, to begin to orient you to the ideas and impulses that will shape the practice that will be shared. This is some of my (Hatlo) thinking as the organizer and facilitator of this practice. The prompts and context documents will be shaped in collaboration with featured artists on each day who will share their own responses in Velocity’s Instagram Stories. Those artists are listed below with the Refractory Aspect of Care they’re focused on for Cultivating Care.
Engage with this early process work however feels best to you. We’re excited for you to join us during the Kick-Off and see how the practice has evolved!
Cultivating Care is rooted in the ethos of the Sow Queer Town Hall Residency of 2019. Some Sow Queer tenets that extend through Cultivating Care: this practice is rooted in the belief that all manner of attempts and efforts are worthwhile, lifelines over deadlines, allow for both process and anti-process to happen without judgement or focus on product, and be present in community while focused on your own endeavors.
DAILY PRACTICES
Day 1: SELF
Day 1: Monday, September 28th
Refractory Aspect of Care: SELF
Featured Artist: Alyza Delpan Monley
Interested in ideas around self-definition, assessing and gauging capacities, methods for replenishing your stores of care, both for yourself (inward) and to extend (outward). Problematizing ways that ‘self-care’ has been commodified as pampering and hyper-individualism – and instead grounding the power of self-care in the abundance and resourcefulness of ourselves within interdependent connections.
context document may include:
Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology and the TBINAA website
adrienne maree brown on Living In This Queer Body Podcast: Let the Hard Shit be Hard and Look for the Pleasure, Look for the Joy
Mimi Zhu’s instagram post For Those Who Have Trouble Spending Time Alone
And adrienne maree brown’s blog post on self care vs community care from 2012: How About a Beginning of Self-Determined Care
Day 2: COMMUNITY + RELATIONSHIPS
Day 2: Tuesday, September 29th
Refractory Aspect of Care: COMMUNITY + RELATIONSHIPS
Featured Artist: Shelby Handler
Examining current and aspirational care practices in relationship with close community, with a focus on reciprocity, generosity and abundance rather than scarcity. Also interested in thinking about aspens and mycelium and other interconnected beings that share resources for long term collective survival.
Context document may include:
Mia Birdsong on Prentice Hemphill’s Finding Our Way podcast: Community and Belonging
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book Care Work in general and the Care Webs chapter specifically
Mia Mingus blogpost on Dreaming Accountability
Day 3: DIFFERENCE (self + Others)
Day 3: Wednesday September 30th
Refractory Aspect of Care: DIFFERENCE (self + Others)
Featured Artist: Nic Masangkay
Thinking of care beyond our immediate spheres of relationship and known community. An exploration that may generate and amplify our perception of our own qualities of difference and how we experience difference in Others, with difference being understood and defined as that which is outside of the normative or common. Challenging stratifications of difference as tools used to repel us from Others, moving toward humility, empathy, mutuality, and interconnection.
Context document may include:
Maria Popova writing about Audre Lorde on Kinship Across Difference
Resmaa Menakem on the On Being podcast: Notice the Rage, Notice the Silence
Alexis Pauline Gumbs blog post on Guidance from Mile Deep Diving Whales
Keeange Yamatta Taylor on the Combahee River Collective: Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Are Free
Day 4: SYSTEMS
Day 4: Thursday October 1st
Refractory Aspect of Care: SYSTEMS
Featured Artists: Shireen and Mehera
Naming and defining local to broader systems we are in relationship with, giving and receiving care – includes nature/land/ecosystems/the more than human world, indigenous tribes/first nations, the State, non-profit industrial complex/orgs, institutions, capitalism, etc. Expanding our idea about what care is needed, desired, possible for ourselves, our communities, our localities and beyond from the systems we are enmeshed in, and those we more actively choose to be in relationship with. Ideas around entitlements, accountability, reciprocity, needs and demands.
Context document may include:
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass
Queer Nature on So Many Wings Podcast
Joyful Militancy: building thriving resistance in toxic times – Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery
Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance is an in-progress, living document collectively authored and compiled. Video link to guided response.
Disability Justice is Simply Another Term for Love by Mia Mingus
Video of the Care For the Future plenary from the recent Allied Media Conference featuring Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Loira Limbal and Veralucia Mendoza
Day 5: TIME
Day 5: Friday October 2nd
Refractory Aspect of Care: TIME
Featured Artist: Minna Lee
Focused on lineage, the ancestral, inheritance through bloodlines or not. What has been modeled for us, historically, by family, socially. Relating to and in conversation with the future, our own and what exists beyond us. The horizon. Softening our relationship to time, productivity, output, rest, exploitation, regeneration and rebirth. Engaging with expansiveness and that which is restorative.
Context document may include:
Jose Esteban Munoz’s book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
+ this article about it Enduring ‘Straight Time’ to Build Our Radical Queer Utopia by Nik Valdez
Tricia Hersey on For the Wild Podcast – Rest as Resistance
What To Do When Everything Feels Broken – a TedTalk by Jomama Jones/Daniel Alexander Jones
The Center of the Universe: On Being Where We Are – a blog post about an ancestral accountability intensive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Saidiya Hartman Unravels the Archive review of her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I also include the whole book, emphasizing the intro A Note On Method, for its herculean example of caring for the past.
Day 6: Reflection Mixer
Day 6: Friday October 3nd | 12 PM
Reflection Mixer / Closing Party
Join us for this Fall Kick Off closing party and mixer with HATLO and all featured artists.
It will be conducted on Zoom, and consist of a short panel reflecting on the themes, ideas and discoveries of the week long Cultivating Care practice.
ABOUT CULTIVATING CARE
Cultivating Care is a 5-day communal exploration of personal relationships to care toward identifying individual and collective values around care we need, deserve, enjoy, and aspire to give and receive. This practice experiment hopes to support a wild harmony of self-definitions, accountable entitlements, invitations, requests, gifts, and exchanges that generate Care-Full practices and relationships between artists and our communities. Care is refractory; spinning, bouncing in many directions, both inward and outward and reciprocal; a relational network of extension, generosity, understanding, effort, and negotiation.
Cultivating Care will activate a special interdisciplinary edition of SCORENTINE, a virtual space Velocity started for their community to make, share, and find comfort in prompt-based movement exploration during our necessary physical distancing. Cultivating Care will be featured Monday Sept 28 – Friday, Oct 2nd on Velocity’s Instagram account. Refractory aspects of Care will be explored through a series of prompts, a contextual resource document related to the days’ theme, and a #CultivatingCare Featured Artist sharing their response on Instagram through movement, writing, visual art, dialogue, music, etc. Participation is open to all. Folks can share their responses along on social media or use the prompts as part of their personal practice at home. The Featured Artists and organizing artist HATLO will close the week with a short panel reflecting on the themes, ideas and discoveries of the week-long Cultivating Care practice.
Cultivating Care is rooted in the ethos of the Sow Queer Town Hall Residency of 2019. Some Sow Queer tenets that extend through Cultivating Care; this practice is rooted in the belief that all manner of attempts and efforts are worthwhile, allow for both process and anti-process to happen without judgment or focus on product, and be present in the community while focusing on your own endeavors.